Jihad Watch rips the New York Times:

Fort Dix jihad plot: New York Times ignores the obvious

That’s why it is calledÂ ‘The New Duranty Times”

JIHAD IN U.S. STREETS

Zealot Muslims now plan to bathe America’s streets with gunfire just as is going on in Iraq, Afghanistan, Sudan, Darfur and so forth.
Distribution Source : ArriveNet Editorials

J. Grant Swank, Jr. (ArriveNet Editorials – May 04, 2007) — “These killers are known as “paintball jihadists” in that they practice in paintball game style what they have planned for America’s streets. They are already training others in “urban combat” using paintball guns. They will engage in paramilitary-style training right under our noses, and lie about it to our faces. They are protected, in some cases, by the religious Imams, some who even encourage or schedule such outings.”

Zealot Muslims now plan to bathe America’s streets with gunfire just as is going on in Iraq, Afghanistan, Sudan, Darfur and so forth.

Once these Allah devotees get hold, they don’t stop. Street fighting never ends. Further, these fighters are more than willing to sacrifice their own bodies and those of their families and neighbors in order to see through Islam World Rule.

Douglas J. Hagmann, Director, Northeast Intelligence Network, reports that American officials already know of the process. However, both government and media are muffling detail.

Jihad will come to the United States due to “Muslim men inside the U.S., (the latter) adhering to the Islamist ideology of jihad, preparing for war on the streets of America.

“The ‘insider’ reports are very troubling and are purposely being downplayed by official sources and go largely unreported in the media.

“One case, however, can serve as an example of what is taking place all across the U.S. involving the procurement and disbursement of weapons to Muslim ‘jihadists.’ On Tuesday, May 2, 2007, a federal indictment was unsealed in the U.S. federal court in St. Louis naming eight Islamic men as defendants in a case involving the buying, selling or hiding of automatic weapons, an anti-personnel mine and other explosives.

“The case originated with the arrest of Mousa M. ABUELAWI, 22, of Creve Coeur, MO on December 29, 2006. He was charged with three counts of illegal possession or distribution of a machine gun and conspiracy to violate machine gun statutes. A superseding indictment unsealed yesterday, charges ABUELAWI and seven others with machine gun charges and charges of conspiracy, lying to the FBI and other firearms violations.

“The other seven defendants identified in the indictment are identified as: Thaer Abde SUMAD, 23, of Florissant, MO, Abdikarin WARSAME, 28, Charley M. HUNT Jr., 45, Darnell T. THORNTON, 25, and Hussein Ali NURE, 29, all from Jennings, MO, Mohamed JUDEH, 20, of Maryland Heights and Otha L. BAKER, 20, of St. Louis. If found guilty of the charges, the men face 5-10 years in prison.”

“In the case of ABUELAWI and the other seven defendants, the men met at gas stations located in north St. Louis between August 2006 and January 2007 to buy or transfer automatic weapons and explosives. In the original documents charging Abuelawi, Sumad is quoted in a meeting with ABUELAWI and a government informer as saying that ‘he wants to buy as many explosives as possible because, “we’re going to war.”‘”

HE deputy spiritual leader of Sheik Taj Din al-Hilali has told his students that it is “obligatory” for all Muslims to engage in jihad if an Islamic country is under attack, even if it means killing the enemy’s children.

* Obviously, Beslan was no accident.

Unfortunately the good Sheik was not available for a photo-op, so we used the file photo…

Sheik Shady Suleiman, a youth leader at Lakemba Mosque in Sydney’s southeast, told his students in a one-hour Arabic and English lecture that it would be “self defence” to kill children who were attacking them in battle.

Muslim leaders yesterday attacked the 29-year-old cleric, who has a substantial following in Sydney, and accused him of delivering a message contrary to that of Prophet Mohammed who said children should not be killed in war. Prominent Sydney-based imam Khalil Shami said Sheik Shady’s message was “dangerous” because it was open to being misconstrued by young Muslims.

“It is very dangerous,” he said. “Because … he puts in their minds that they have to do this, and he prepares them for something wrong for sure.” The nation’s leading spiritual Muslim woman Aziza Abdel-Halim said Sheik Shady’s message diverged from Islamic teachings that prohibit the killing of children.

In a lecture titled Rulings on Performing Jihad, obtained by The Australian, Sheik Shady differentiates between defensive and offensive jihad and quotes the Prophet by saying anyone who fights to defend their land, soul, and wealth was considered a “Shahid” (martyr). “If attackers or invaders want to invade a Muslim country or attack a Muslim country then it’s obligatory on every Muslim … to fight and protect the country,” he says.

Sheik Shady says while the Prophet condemned the killing of children, “if they are involved then you have to stop them”.

* He didn’t say anything about shaheeds hiding behind women and children when they attack infidels?

“If you have a child carrying a knife and coming to you, or a sword and coming to kill you in the middle of the battle, they (the fighters) are going to look at him and say ‘the Prophet said not to touch him’ – no, that’s wrong.”

Sheik Shady, who is lecturing in Britain, yesterday defended his message on jihad, saying it was a part of a series of lectures delivered in 2002, before the Iraq war – and focused on the collection of the traditions of Mohammed – although a copy of the lecture appears on his website dated May 2004.

He said the lecture was delivered to 60 young men who were advanced in Islamic studies and would not take it out of context and was “not an open lecture”, despite being on his website.

* If caught, lie and deny. Standard procedure…

“When I said children, I did not mean, of course, if you’re going to get a five- or seven-year-old coming to attack you, you can stop him,” he said yesterday.

“I was talking about self-defence. If you get attacked by someone, then you have the right to defend yourself. It doesn’t mean you go kill them, especially if it’s someone young.”

* Muslims always claim ‘self-defence’- especially when they blow up women and children in Israel…

* Don’t you think its about time we should be defending ourselves?

Sheik Shady said that while it was obligatory for all Muslims to defend an Islamic nation under attack, there were no Muslim countries living under Sharia law that were currently under attack.

* No arrest warrant has yet been issued for Sheik Shady Sulaiman. Good name, by the way…

The only religion NOT founded on The Golden Rule. Morality is based on Mohammed’s example. If Mohammed did it then it’s OK for all Muslims. Hence the encouragement of rape, pillage, subjugation and murder of non-believers and the institutionalised pedophilia prevalent thoughout Muslim society (justified by Mohammed’s activities with Ayesha, his child sex-slave).Â

Last night’s toll: rioting in several cities, more than 500 torched cars, hundreds of arrests, and who knows how much property damage. If this were happening in the US, you can be sure there would be dozens of articles on the wires, and blogs like Daily Kos would be ranting and blaming George Bush.

Some 500 youths shouting “Sarko, fascist!” went on a rampage in the Bastille district of eastern Paris on Monday night, burning 10 cars, looting two stores including a supermarket and smashing windows, police said.

A total of 218 people were detained during four hours of clashes in which protesters threw stones, beer cans and bottles at police, one of whom was injured. Fifteen people remained in custody on Tuesday.

Anti-Sarkozy protests turned violent overnight in France’s second city of Lyon, in Lille, Toulouse, Nantes and Rennes.

More than 500 cars were set alight in cities and suburbs across the country, according to police reports gathered by AFP, many more than the 70 to 100 vehicles that are attacked on an average night in France.

Only in America:

While the the Hamas-linked radical front group CAIR continues to give training sessions to the FBI, a group of Muslims including some illegal Jihadists were getting ready to attack Fort Dix:

(NEW LONDON, CT, 5/7/07) – Representatives of the Connecticut chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR-CT) recently offered diversity and sensitivity training on Islam and Muslims to officials at the New Haven office of the FBI.

The hour-long training included information on basic Islamic beliefs and practices.

WASHINGTON (CNN) â€” Six “Islamic radicals” involved in a plot to kill U.S. soldiers at Fort Dix in New Jersey were arrested Monday night, the U.S. attorney’s office in New Jersey said Tuesday.

One of the suspects was born in Jordan, another in Turkey, the U.S. attorney’s office said. The rest are believed to be from the former Yugoslavia, “either U.S. citizens or living illegally in the United States,” the office said in a statement.

“Their alleged intention was to conduct an armed assault on the army base and to kill as many soldiers as possible,” according to the statement.

The six are expected to appear in U.S. District Court in Camden on Tuesday afternoon, the U.S. attorney’s office said in a statement.

The district attorney scheduled a news conference at 2:30 p.m. ET to discuss the case.

The men were planning to use automatic weapons to shoot soldiers at the Army post, according to a federal law enforcement source and a senior government source.

The men, some of whom were related to each other, had been doing surveillance and planning “for a while,” and they trained in the Poconos Mountains in northeastern Pennsylvania, according to the federal law enforcement source.

They played paintball and test-fired weapons, a law enforcement source said.

“I’m Doing it in the Name of Allah”

Islamic advocates are already getting out in front of the media and saying we must not “equate actions with religion.” The six Muslims arrested in the Fort Dix terror plot have absolutely nothing to do with Islam, they say. Complete fluke that they’re Muslims. Could just as well have been Mennonites, really.

But someone forgot to tell the plotters.

One suspect reportedly spoke of using rocket-propelled grenades to kill at least 100 soldiers at a time, according to court documents.

The jihadists who couldn’t shoot straight

Unlikely that such an argument would get ’em off, though…Â

“Terror suspects were ‘bad shots,’ says local marksman,” from the Pocono Record:

Suspicious activity at a public shooting range in Monroe County led an official from the state game commission to tip authorities on what turned out to be an alleged terror plot to attack Fort Dix in New Jersey.
“(The men arrested Monday) allegedly used our rifle range in the Gouldsboro area to train in some tactics,” said Tim Conway of the game commission in a phone interview at 12:20 p.m. today. “We did recognize a few things awhile back and reported that to the appropriate authorities.”

Randy Swiden of Blakeslee, a regular at the shooting range near Gouldsboro, said he remembers three to five guys shooting AK-47s there last fall. Swiden was interviewed at the range this morning.

Swiden said he heard the guys speaking in what sounded like Russian to each other and in broken English with a Russian accent to others. The six suspects arrested are nationals of the former Yugoslavia….

Swiden, 59, said he remembers the guys were shooting with 20-round clips rather than the typical three-round clips. He described them as “bad shots.”

They were shooting at 50-yard targets, packs of paper plates and milk jugs, and were missing.

Between them they had three AK-47s, Swiden said.

6 charged with plot on Army post in N.J.

ORT DIX, N.J. – Six Islamic militants from Yugoslavia and the Middle East were arrested on charges of plotting to attack the Fort Dix Army post and “kill as many soldiers as possible,” authorities said Tuesday.

In conversations secretly recorded by an FBI informant over the past year, the men talked about killing in the name of Allah and attacking U.S. warships that might dock in Philadelphia, according an FBI criminal complaint.

“This was a serious plot put together by people who were intent on harming Americans,” U.S. Attorney Christopher Christie said Tuesday. “We’re very gratified federal law enforcement was able to catch these people before they acted and took innocent life.”

One suspect reportedly spoke of using rocket-propelled grenades to kill at least 100 soldiers at a time, according to court documents.

“If you want to do anything here, there is Fort Dix and I don’t want to exaggerate, and I assure you that you can hit an American base very easily,” suspect Mohamad Ibrahim Shnewer said in one conversation secretly recorded by a government informant, according to the criminal complaint.

“It doesn’t matter to me whether I get locked up, arrested or get taken away,” a suspect identified as Serdar Tatar said in another recorded conversation. “Or I die, it doesn’t matter. I’m doing it in the name of Allah.”

Another suspect, Eljvir Duka, was recorded saying: “In the end, when it comes to defending your religion, when someone is trying attacks your religion, your way of life, then you go jihad.”

*

Meanwhile, the howling and whincing has already started: “If these people did something, then they deserve to be punished to the fullest extent of the law,” said Sohail Mohammed, a lawyer who represented many of the detainees. “But when the government says ‘Islamic militants,’ it sends a message to the public that Islam and militancy are synonymous.”

“Don’t equate actions with religion,” he said.

Can’t have people wake up to Islam-fascism, right Mohammed?

All religions are the same… right?

Best coverage from Michelle Malkin:

What a way to show their gratitude:

Flashback June 1999:

The sounds of Islamic calls to prayer echo across Fort Dix, temporary host to thousands of ethnic Albanians who fled war-ravaged Kosovo. But the U.S. Army base will soon play final taps for the refugee resettlement program that should end this month.
“I feel like I’m in a paradise,” one Kosovar explained, as she described the base that has been a haven for about 4,000 refugees.

With nationwide settlement efforts in full swing, the military has no plans to bring other refugees to the makeshift village.

So far, 500 Kosovars have been relocated; about 100 are scheduled to leave daily. All the refugees should know by mid-June where they will be going, officials said.

“This was always intended to be a temporary facility,” said Michael Kharfen, spokesman for the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.

After arriving at Fort Dix from camps in Macedonia, the refugees received medical checkups, security clearances and U.S. government documents.

Shaheed Mouse

A Mickey Mouse-like character is making regular appearances on Hamas’s al-Aqsa TV to teach Palestinian children that Islam will “dominate the world,” the Palestinian Media Watch (PMW) organization said in a press release.

“The squeaky-voiced Mickey Mouse look-alike, named Farfur, is the star of a weekly children’s program called Tomorrow’s Pioneers on the official Hamas TV station,” PMW said, adding that the character takes “every opportunity to indoctrinate young viewers with teachings of Islamic supremacy, hatred of Israel and the US and support of ‘resistance’ â€“ the Palestinian euphemism for terror.”

“We are setting with you the cornerstone for world leadership under Islamic leadership. Isn’t it so, Saraa’?” Farfur asked, turning to a young girl who co-presents the children’s program.

“Yes, our beloved children,” she replied.

“You must be careful regarding your prayer and to go to the mosque for all five (daily) prayers. I say, in the mosque and in the first rows, until we can lead the world,” Farfur continued.

“We remind you that we, the great ones, started this program to lead this world. The nucleus, with the will of Allah, will be from here, from Palestine. We will carry the concern of this (Islamic) nation that awaits us,” added Saraa.

The dialogue makes clear to children watching the program that Israel’s destruction is a clear goal of “Allah’s program.”

“From Palestine, oh Saraa’, what do you mean? From Gaza, Jerusalem, Ramallah, or from all of Palestine?” Farfur asked. “Yes, from all of Palestine,” she answered.

“Yes, we, tomorrow’s pioneers, will restore to this nation its glory, and we will liberate Al-Aqsa, with Allah’s will, and we will liberate Iraq, with Allah’s will, and we will liberate the Muslim countries, invaded by murderers,” Farfur declared.

“Yes, they are children occupied by the Jews, but with the will of Allah, we will resist and protect against the Zionist occupation,” the girl replied.

Those who brought us 9/11, blow up children in schools, (Beslan/Iraq) Nightclubs in Bali, bomb commuter trains in London and Madrid, blow up theaters in Moscow and bomb buses and markets from Thailand to Kashmir, the brave ‘mujaheddin’ who kidnap and maim, saw heads off innocent victims in front of video camera’s which they then distribute on CD’s and on the net, are the scum of the earth. We cannot negotiate with those who want us death or forcibly converted. We must eradicate them before they annihilate us.

Our ancestors have fought long and hard for our freedom. It is not for us to give it away for misguided, idiotic concepts like ‘political correctness’ or ‘multi-culti diversity’ bullshit. Freedom of expression, freedom of speech, freedom of religion, but even more so FREEDOM from religion isNON- NEGOTIABLE.

While some of our leftie utopians are stuck on stupid and ‘B.U.S.H’ and blame us and our soldiers for civilians killed, they never bother to blame the enemy from hiding among women and children, which is essentially traditional Muhammedan warfare.

Gerard Henderson explains why it matters that no Leftist in Australia, to his knowledge, has denounced the terrorist killings in Iraq:

On January 28, 2004 Green Left Weekly asked Pilger: “Do you think the anti-war movement should be supporting Iraq’s anti-occupation resistance?”

Pilger replied unequivocally: “Yes, I do. We cannot afford to be choosy. While we abhor and condemn the continuing loss of innocent life in Iraq, we have no choice now but to support the resistance for, if the resistance fails, the Bush gang will attack another country. If they succeed, a grievous blow will be suffered by the Bush gang.”Â

Taliban flee battle using children as shields: NATO

The ugliest of tactics in the jihad against a hydroelectric dam. By Terry Friel for Reuters:

KABUL (Reuters) – Taliban fighters used children as human shields to flee heavy fighting this week during an operation by foreign and Afghan forces to clear rebels from around a key hydro-electric dam, NATO said on Wednesday.
The Taliban have used human shields before, but never children, local residents say.
The fighting occurred during Operation Kryptonite on Monday, an offensive to clear insurgents from the Kajaki Dam area in southern Helmand province to allow repairs to its power plants and the installation of extra capacity.
“During this action … Taliban extremists resorted to the use of human shields. Specifically, using local Afghan children to cover as they escaped out of the area,” Colonel Tom Collins, a spokesman for the NATO-led International Security Assistance Force (ISAF), told reporters in Kabul.
The Kajaki Dam fighting was in an area where 700 mainly foreign fighters, including Chechens, Pakistanis and Uzbeks, arrived from Pakistan this week to reinforce Taliban guerrillas.

Nothing special in Pali-land or in Iraq, they do it every day:

And you thought they could not sink lower

Poaching for Bin Laden In the jungles of India

Local animal trappers have a new breed of client: Islamic militants using the trade in rare wildlife to raise funds for their cause. Adrian Levy and Cathy Scott-Clark report from Assam Saturday May 5, 2007
The Guardian
It is so early in the morning that the cooks in the roadside dhabas along India’s National Highway 37 are asleep in their kitchens, their tandoors unlit. Across the valley of Assam, in this far north-easterly corner of India, there is not a flicker of light except the feeble yellow beams from the Gypsies, the open-backed vehicles carrying small groups of tourists to the edge of one of the world’s most bountiful jungles.
Kaziranga – 429 sq km of forest, sandbanks and grassland – was recognised by Unesco in 1985 as a world heritage site. Tourists come in their thousands to glimpse some of the 480 species of bird, 34 kinds of mammal and 42 varieties of fish, many rare, endangered or near extinct, that inhabit this remote jungle.
In recent times, however, the wildlife has attracted a new kind of visitor. According to India’s security services, police, intelligence analysts, local traders and forestry officials, Islamic militants affiliated to al-Qaida are sponsoring poaching in the reserve for profit. These groups have established bases in the formerly moderate enclave of Bangladesh and have agents operating all along the country’s porous 2,500-mile border with India. They have gone into business with local animal trappers and organised crime syndicates around Kaziranga – as well as in parks and reserves in Nepal, Burma and Thailand – in a quest for horns, ivory, pelts and other animal products with which to raise “under the wire” funds that they can move around the world invisibly.

A small rhino horn, the size of a bag of sugar, with good provenance (the beast’s tail and ears, presented to a prospective buyer) and in the right marketplace (in Asia, Europe or North America), can fetch Â£20,000. Big cat pelts can go for up to Â£10,000. Monkey brains, bear bile, musk, big cat carcasses, elephant feet, tails, horns and teeth have considerable value. A shipment worth Â£2.8m was recently intercepted by UK customs. Profits from the trade run from $15bn to an incredible $25bn a year, according to estimates from the WWF (formerly the World Wide Fund for Nature). The punishment for trading in these items is generally a fine as low as Â£300 in India and Â£900 in Nepal.
A senior Indian security source, based in the north-east, who has tracked the incursion into the trade by Bangladeshi militants, warns that the poaching has global consequences. “There is an environmental disaster in the offing here, but as pressing are the security ramifications,” he says. “Only a minuscule percentage of the vast profits need to trickle back into a nascent Islamic insurgency in a country like Bangladesh to bring it to the boil. And then it can reach out around the world.”

One has only to tour Kaziranga, or any of the outlying parks in Assam or Nepal, to understand why. Dawn breaks as our convoy of Gypsies reaches the park. The rangers whisper urgently, “Gorh”, the local word for rhinoceros. Metres away, eight rhino are lumbering through the rich alluvial mud, showing off their prized uni-horn. There are more than 2,000 of these short-sighted beasts here, making up three-quarters of the global stock of one of the rarest pachyderms in the world. Beside them are scores of swamp deer coloured like the scrub. A group of wild buffalo, whose colossal horns have the span of a longboat oar, plod by, as does a troop of elephants, their tusks glinting in the purple dawn. Somewhere in the long grass, which rises in clumps like a castle keep, are more Royal Bengal tigers per square kilometre than in any other stretch of jungle in the world – broken down into their constituent parts, each is worth as much as a bespoke Italian racing car.

One man says, “We are for hire. We can trap and shoot, but when the summer rain comes, the river breaks its banks and the animals float to us.” Another adds, “We patrol the park’s border, too; when the animals wander out, we are there.” He pulls from his pocket an unidentifiable animal claw.
These sand bar dwellers at the start of the tangled enterprise know far more about the intricacies of the business than the authorities told us they would. They draw trafficking routes in the sand, explaining how the trade is coordinated by agents across Assam. A villager places stones on the sand-map to mark the towns. “Golaghat, Tezpur, Kamrup, Nagaon, these are the main places for agents.” They answer to a boss based in Dimapur, one of the richest cities in the neighbouring state of Nagaland, with a highway that runs into Burma and rail links to New Delhi and Calcutta . “But everything tends to collect and move through Siliguri,” a villager says, identifying a chaotic city in West Bengal which is also a springboard into the Himalayan kingdoms of Nepal and Bhutan

A trader with an import-export company near to the India-Bangladesh border explains: “They came to us because we are the same as them,” he says. “The hauliers and money men behind the wildlife trade are of Bangladeshi origin. The poachers, too. All of us can move freely over the border. We look right. Talk the same. They wanted in. Small, valuable commodities – horn, teeth, pelts – fetch incredible prices and are easy to conceal among legitimate export goods. Also, something truly valuable can be used to borrow against, to secure a line of credit.”

Boro is an awkward man. He does not drink or get stoned when all around him do. He believes in straight talking. “We cannot stop but it is difficult sometimes to go on. We are up against it. This is hard, hard work. We have to be merciless. This is a war for survival.”
He pulls from a cabinet a photo album. On the first page is a picture of a corpse splattered by shotgun fire. “I killed this man as he prepared to stake out a rhino.” He turns the pages and points to another corpse, its entrails dangling like ship’s bunting. “I killed this one, too, as he sawed at a rhino’s horn.” There are scores more photographs picturing the dead laid out like mackerel.
We ask him about the new jihadi component in the trade. “We hear things but we have no hard facts. The rhino horns are used to buy guns and bombs, we are told. The guys we catch, what can they tell us? The colour of the shirt worn by the guy who paid them off.”
In December, Boro’s men tracked a gang of poachers to their tents. They had fled but left behind a new, modern tranquilliser gun and darts. “They used to shoot at rhinos, but the crack of the bullet is a problem as it carries far and we will hear. Some place poison. Others pull down power lines and try to electrocute the animals. However, recently they have come here with silencers. We are finding increasingly sophisticated weapons.”

Britain’s growing racial divide

People share the shopping centre – but they’re not shopping together
Panorama visits Blackburn in Lancashire to investigate how increased separation and segregation between Muslim Asians and whites is dividing communities.

Blackburn presents a stark example of a difficult, national problem.

For all the hopeful talk about “integration”, “multiculturalism” and now “cohesion”, the reality on the ground appears to be that Britain’s Muslim Asian community and its white community have few points of contact, and that the white majority often feel they share little in common with the growing Muslim Asian minority.

Of course there are hopeful exceptions, but Blackburn – where Muslim Asians on the last census made up 24% of the population and whose local council takes the issue very seriously – demonstrates clearly what the problem is.

The risk is of separate communities, and of people breathing the same air but walking past each other
Jack Straw,
Blackburn MP

Anyone who goes to Blackburn’s town centre, and takes a look around, will see that whites and Muslim Asians are sharing the shopping centre and that everyone is behaving perfectly courteously to each other.

So what’s the problem? Well, look a bit more carefully, and you’ll see that they are both here doing their shopping – but they’re not shopping together.

‘White flight’

4,000 suspected jihadists in UK

The Tiny Minority of Extremists doubles in size. “‘4,000 terror suspects in UK,'” by John Steele in the Telegraph

Up to 4,000 terrorism suspects and their supporters are active in Britain, the former Metropolitan Police Commissioner Lord Stevens said yesterday.
Lord Stevens said the security service MI5 had recently suggested a figure of 2,000 but the true number was “probably nearer 4,000”.

Police and MI5 were “still too underfunded and undermanned to cope with the task they face in the decades to come. And that’s how long this will last,” he said.

The “infection” had spread out from “hot spots” such as Luton, the West Midlands and Finsbury Park in London and those involved in the fertiliser bomb plot case which finished this week were “ordinary and British”.

And all Muslim, of course, and all committed to jihad against the infidel, but that is the unifying factor among them that Must Not Be Named.

Lord Stevens also gave warning that al-Qa’eda-linked extremists were already trying to infiltrate the police and the security services and that dozens had already been weeded out.He urged that known terrorism suspects and “hate clerics”, such as Abu Hamza and Abu Qatada, should be deported, adding: “Our human rights come first. Yet, incredibly, our so-called Human Rights laws, and our enviable history of religious tolerance, mean that foreigners preaching death and destruction to our way of life are allowed to stay here because their own countries won’t tolerate such evil.”

Doctors split on hymen repairs

A DEBATE is raging among doctors over Muslim women who demand operations to reconstitute their hymens before marriage and medical certificates stating they are virgins.
The controversy has flared in France, where gynaecologists say they are facing a growing number of requests from women desperate to avoid the repudiation that can follow the loss of chastity.

The phenomenon, which is also dividing doctors in other European countries, the US and Africa, is denounced by critics as a sign of social regression driven by Islamic fundamentalists.

Jacques Lansac, chairman of the French National College of Gynaecologists and Obstetricians, is leading the campaign against what he describes as “an attack on the dignity of women”.

He has also issued advice against hymenoplasty – a surgical operation that involves reconstructing the membrane usually broken during the first act of sexual intercourse.

“We get more and more women coming in and saying that their brothers or fathers will kill them if they find out they’ve slept with a man. But it’s important to say no, because if we don’t we’re giving in to the fundamentalists,” Professor Lansac said.

However, he said some doctors were ignoring his advice in the hope of protecting patients from ostracisation or beatings.

Isabelle Levy, an author who studied the issue for her book Religion in the Hospital, said the search for chastity certificates and hymenoplasties stemmed from conflicting pressures among France’s five million Muslims.

“On the one hand, young Muslim girls born in France go out a lot more than they used to,” she said.

“They are modern and they have adventures like other Europeans – which never happened in the past.

“But on the other hand, fundamentalism is spreading and these girls are getting sent back to their countries of origin to marry. And they will be rejected if it is found out that they are not virgins.”

The plight was evident from the account of one woman of North African origin on a French internet chat forum.

She slept with her boyfriend because “he said that he was mad about me and wanted to marry me and I believed him because I was madly in love with him”. But he left her when she fell pregnant. The woman had an abortion, which she kept secret from her family until her mother discovered a letter from the clinic.

“I fainted and afterwards it was total despair – tears, insults, blows, disappointment and finally a dressing-down. She has asked her gynaecologist to redo her hymen because she says that ‘if not, it will ruin my future’.”

Several private French clinics carry out hymenoplasties. But some doctors agree to undertake the operation in public hospitals, where it is funded by the welfare state, a practice that is not in theory authorised by officials.

Stephane Saint-Leger, head of gynaecology at Aulnay-sous-Bois hospital refuses virginity certificates because “it’s not a medical problem whether you’re a virgin or not”.

While some doctors will not sign virginity certificates because it is not a medical problem, others will.

Jacques Milliez, head of the department of gynaecology and obstetrics at Saint-Antoine hospital in Paris, said: “I worked in Algeria as a junior doctor and when I was on call at night I saw these young women whose throats had been slit because they were suspected of having lost their virginity. So if someone asks me, I sign the certificate.”